Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [40]
However, in the early 1990s, supermarkets became tired of the high proportion of corked bottles and put pressure on producers to find an alternative. Over the following few years, more than ten different types of synthetic cork crowded onto the stage. There are substantial problems with plastic: there is some loss of flavor, technically known as “scalping;” there can be plastic taint; plastic-stoppered bottles lose sulfur dioxide too quickly, thereby encouraging oxidation and premature aging; and plastic corks are hard to extract from the bottle and impossible to push back in. As David Bird has written in Understanding Wine Technology, “There are those who would say that it is a pointless product—it is trying to imitate natural cork, which itself has imperfections.” The main problem is aging. After eighteen months, the state of the wine in a plastic-corked bottle does begin to decline, but since relatively little supermarket wine is much older than that, this does not much matter. And for fast-moving, lower-value wine, such as that of large-scale New World producers or the supermarkets’ own labels, plastic corks were for some years the closure of choice.
But times have changed, because now there is the screw cap, the most successful of the three in preventing oxidation. They give a perfect seal, do not cause taint or suffer from quality variation, and can be opened with the bare hand. Indeed, they have been known to protect white wine for ten years. The problem is presentation: do screw caps still imply a cheap wine or remind too many consumers of opening a bottle of vinegar?
The current state of play seems to be as follows. Most producers of premium wine, and especially of red wine, use natural cork, not least because they believe that their traditionally minded customers would be outraged if anything other than cork stoppered their bottles of wine. At a lower price level, and for wines which are meant to be drunk young, the use of plastic corks is still widespread, but they are increasingly being supplanted by screw caps. The screw cap was for some years primarily used for the cheapest wines, but today, here and there—especially in New Zealand, Australia, and California—increasing numbers of quality wine producers have adopted it. But the status hierarchy remains: do you prefer that the wine you drink be protected by a metal screw cap, a length of extruded plastic, or a piece of bark? The ceremony of removal of a cork by a skilled wine waiter is a wonderful one, even down to the suspicious sniffing of the cork, but the results seem to be depressingly uneven.
Does wine really provoke the desire and take away the per for mance?
IT’S BEEN the butt, as it were, of jokes since time immemorial, summed up by a drunken porter:
PORTER: Faith sir, we were carousing till the second cock: and drink, sir, is a great provoker of three things.
MACDUFF: What three things does drink especially provoke?
PORTER: Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the per for mance: therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.
Now we know it vulgarly as the “brewer’s droop,” but it might as well be the distiller’s or, indeed, the vintner’s, were it not for